Zach's Vision of the Future

A critical exploration of the world to come

Sources

• A couple Tumblr posts that I really liked.
• My heart's wants
• common (or "gut") sense.
• Science Papers. Lots of them.

1. We will all have homemade airships.

• We no longer live on the ground, but returned to the trees and air.
• Everyone builds their own ship. They are a mixture of home, vehicle, and theme song that we've refined since childhood.
• We navigate across the sky in a sort of personal cursive, and the ground is like a front parlor we visit only on special occasions.

2. Our Energy is much greener.

• Technology has completely integrated with nature, like a sapling branch grafted onto an old growth tree.
• Everything we need is fueled by moss and sun and we always give back more than we could take.
• In a future summer we will travel to the Olympic rain forest, and stand beneath the network of branches after a hard rain.
• And as the droplets fall from the branches, heavy and bright with moss, a thrill of danger will be felt, as if we were standing in the middle of a lightning storm.

3. I will be an 85 year old man in the Catalonian wilderness, teaching a robot pottery.

• I built the robot, but consider a friend.
• I don't know exactly how this will happen, but I am sensitive to the signals of history and know where I will likely end.
• Which is to say: teaching a robot to not push down so hard on its thumb pots.
• The robot is fueled by the sun and mushroom pulp, and it recharges by napping.
• When our lesson finishes, it will totter over to the outdoor kiln and power down, slowly blending in with the pottery like a building blending into the sky at dusk.

4. Encryption is cooler.

• We saw the dense fractals of information contained in natural things, and realized they could help with our own technology.
• An object's unique molecular structure could be used as the seed for larger and larger prime numbers. And so, as a natural progression of two factor authentification, The objects and places we cherish become our private keys.
• Teen lovers will send each other messages that can only be read while sitting in the crook of a specific Alder, and holding a stone that has been charged up by the other. It is a romantic and effective password protection--end to end encrypted and sweet.

• As the robot sleeps I walk over to the arbor and make a circle with four stones and an owl skull, repeating a gesture above the circle until a portal appears.
• This is the method I programmed to call my brother.
• It is Wednesday, and we always skype on Wednesday.
• I don't know why that would stop?

5. There are no Suburbs.

• There are no suburbs because there are no cities. We are migrating sky people, who gather mostly in temporary camps high in the canopies of trees.
• Suburbia is now just an exotic word, spoken by the youth to convey a certain sort of pining--a wistful but beautiful expansiveness.
• In the teen's encrypted alder there is a poem with the line "You have planted a suburbia within me." And this line is sincerely beautiful, but makes no sense to us now because our language hasn't caught up with the teen's meaning.

6. There are no Cops.

• We have no need for them and realized they are dumb.
• Cop is not a word poetically spoken. It is closer to an obscure medieval occupation and holds as much nostalgic value in the future as a word like "Gallows Boy" or "Cordswain" today.

7. Everyone looks good.

• Everyone dresses well and fucks often.
• In a future autumn we will go to a cafe co-op set up in an abandoned downtown for the season. We will trade python scripts for biscuits then sit together at a small table by a pollen-stained window.
• You will look outside to see our ships moored to the corner of an old bank building, their energy sails softly opening to to catch the sun.
• And you will be taken by how much they look like large copper butterflies swaying on a bricken leaf and there are so many moments like this...moments when it feels like the whole world is the one touching its foot to yours beneath the table.

8. We still get sad sometimes.

• It happens. We still get lonely.
• Even in a utopia some days will feel impossibly hard.
• Technology won't change that. Technology isn't required to make us sad.

9. But it is easier to stay connected.

• As I rest near the arbor a ship lands behind me and a pleasant stranger walks out.
• We chat about this future Autumn weather and then the visitor says "Wait. Aren't you Zach Mandeville? Aren't you the comedian with 6 back to back Netflix specials!"
• I will say, "you must be thinking of someone else. I am but a humble art teacher for robots."

10. I totally made it in the comedy world. But there are more important things.

• I thank the visitor, but tell them I must go.
• The quartz around my neck is glowing, meaning Angelica has finished her mushroom hunt up north.
• I wake my robot and we walk hand in hand to our ship, then return home to meet you in the air.

By Zach Mandeville / coolguy.website

Originally presented at the March Sleepwalker at Babycastles

then published on The Lark